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Microsoft to double its presence in Russian Skolkovo by 2015

In accordance with the new agreement signed by Microsoft and the Russian Skolkovo innovation center, the corporation is going to hire about 70 more software developers in the next three years for its R&D center to work on mobile data transferring solutions and cloud speech and image recognition technologies.

While the physical infrastructure of the innovation center in Moscow is still under construction, Microsoft is actively expanding its presence there. The corporation pays Skolkovo, which is also called a “Russian Silicon Valley” a lot of attention since 2010, when Steve Ballmer signed a memorandum of understanding with the center’s president Viktor Vekselberg and opened an R&D center there.

The second agreement was signed this Tuesday by the president of Microsoft Russia Nikolay Pryanishnikov and the senior vice-president of Skolkovo Igor Drozdov. In the document, Microsoft states an intention to double the number of staff members in its R&D center and expand the range of projects running there.

New projects Microsoft’s specialists will be working on include a cross-platform mobile solution for multimedia data transferring, Russian Cnews reports. The software will be optimized to work in 3G and LTE as well as Wi-Fi networks.

Another direction of research is a cloud platform for data storage and analysis, which includes speech and image recognition.

Now there are about 70 employees working in the Microsoft’s R&D center in Skolkovo.

The innovation center in Moscow was founded in 2010 and is curated by the Russian government. Companies working in the center get special conditions and tax incentives. Apart from IT, the center attracts residents in fields of energy efficient technologies, nuclear power, biomedicine, and space technologies.